Adding the slightly alarmist and controversial bit afterwards can only help too. Yes I really am such a slave to readership statistics !
So what's this Rapture malarky all about then ? Well for anyone who doesn't know about the importance of today's date in Rapture history, nip off to Google and do a quick search. You'll find that adding "Harold Camping" to the search criteria will help enormously.
Now that we're all on the same page, is it likely to happen ? Who knows. Certainly not Harold Camping as he's had one go at guessing the "End Of Everything" date already. His idea seems to be that if you get it wrong, you just pick another date and so sometime tomorrow morning we can expect news from his Californian home that the 200 million chosen ones can stand down and unpack. He'll email The National Enquirer with the new date in due course.
I think the fact that he lives in California speaks volumes about the validity of his prediction. And we'll probably learn that he was downwind at Woodstock and so can't really be trusted about anything he's said since then. Anyway as the recent governor of that state has proved, you just can't trust anyone there.
Oh get me being current !!
Of course there is even disagreement among (or amongst) those who believe in the details of a second coming. One event or two ? One event with two stages ? And just where do I stand on this topic ?
Well you may not know this, but I'm not a dispensationalist premillennialist. Too many rules and I found the mask chafed. That's not to say I'm an amillennialist either. Didn't like their initiation rites for a start and it was just too far to drive for the weekly meetings.
So I guess I'm a disbelievalist. I know....just made that one up. I don't believe in Rapture and even less in anyone alive today knowing when it will be.
But if religious history has shown us anything, it's that there will always be post Woodstock nutters who are prepared to stand up and be counted. Counted as nutters that is. Just how these people attract followers is beyond me but then I'm not from California.......or Utah for that matter. I suspect that those who follow the likes of Camping and also join religious sects are the same people who buy as-seen-on-tv items and believe in UFO's.
Why they get media attention is also beyond me but then that is the kind of world we live in now. A normal everyday hard working person may occasionally get 15 minutes of fame but the religious nutter who claims he has the exact date of the second coming gets more media coverage than Paris Hilton.
(I've found I get extra readers if I mention her name too. Sorry.)
So when tomorrow follows today and we're all (mostly) still here, what can we learn ?
Well to not give Harold Camping and anyone like him any more coverage for one thing and then if he falls over in that forest, no one will hear him or care less.
As for Rapture, well the jury is still out on that one. The Earth definitely has a 'use by' date because when our sun packs in, so does the Earth. That'll be in a few billion years so I'm not too worried on a personal level.
What does worry me is that it leaves more than enough time for Rapture merchants to pick plenty more dates for the event. Going down the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em"route, I'd like to put forward 25th June 2052 as a good date for the next Rapture watch.
I'll be 100 and probably more than ready for it.
The best thing I've read about it on t'interclacker so far was that it will happen at 6pm. Or for Alex Ferguson, 6.05pm.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, if 200 million go up to Heaven perhaps Sainsbury's won't be so crowded next Saturday and the roads will be much clearer.